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OLGA GREY
I had been a member of the RelianceMajestic Film Company for about a week, and was not an actress yet.
I had been a pianiste, however, for some years. But I was now drawing pay for acting — not piano-playing — so it occurred to me that I had better learn to act.
Not the least of the difficulties that presented themselves to me was the fact that I could not summon my voice to my aid in getting over my parts in the photoplay. So I set about trying to solve the problem which presented itself — to make plain, for photographic purposes, the emotions, intentions and motives of each character I had to play. From observation of Moving Picture plays, I had decided that the facial muscles and eyes were all the tools provided me.
I was waiting to be summoned to a set by my director, when I noted one of the stage carpenters rebuking an assistant who was new to the work. The amateur was nailing some scenery together, and in so doing he held the hammer close to its head. Ten or twelve inches of handle protruded back of his hand, as he industriously, but not very successfully, endeavored to drive nails.
The boss carpenter said : ''What do you s'pose they put a handle on that hammer for, boy?"
How I Learnt to Act
(Fine Arts)
By OLGA GREY
The busy one looked up in amazement, and then at the hammer in his hand, with most of its handle an apparent encumbrance.
"I wonder now," he replied. And then I watched with interest while his boss painstakingly showed him how much easier it was to drive nails when one holds the extreme end of the hammerhandle and uses the full, swinging blow allowed by that method.
Then I suddenly thought, why do they photograph our entire figures in most of the scenes? Why not only the faces of the players, if only the faces are going to be used in expressing the emotions, et cetera? And I immediately resolved to revise my ideas as to my supply of tools of expression and see what I could make of my limbs and body.
I remembered my disgust when friends and acquaintances sat before mechanical pianos and, by holding on to a knob or pressing a button, caused harmony to issue from the instrument while they calmly sat in the operator's seat! How I always longed to ask them what they thought they were supplied with hands, arms and fingers for, if they proposed to provoke music from an instrument with eighty-eight practical noise-producers.
And I began to train my arms, my shoulders, and all the muscular orbits I possessed, to play their parts in expressing whatever the emotion required in whatever scene I appeared before the camera. Before I became an actress, I had mastered the art so thoroly as to be able to reveal as much of my mental processes by muscular movement and without even facing the camera, as in the beginning I had been able to portray by the most intense facial contortions and a vast verbosity.
And so will all who aspire to honors in the photoplay-acting art have to learn. Some may take longer than I, but every studio has not a gifted and pedantic carpenter, nor has every aspirant to thespic glory in the celluloid the time and inclination to observe all that goes on.
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